Book Information: Procedure, the

In the late-sixteenth century, Rabbi Jehudah Low, in order to guarantee the safety of the Jews in Prague, tries to make a golem with the aid of a third-century Cabalist text. He succeeds, but not exactly in the way he had planned.

Four hundred years later Viktor Werner, a biologist, causes an international uproar when he creates in his laboratory a complex organic clay crystal that can reproduce and which has a metabolism. He has, in effect, manufactured a primitive organism out of inorganic materials. Much of his story is told through the letters he writes, via his estranged wife, to his stillborn daughter, Aurora; after his unsettling discovery, he roams the world from California to Venice, Cairo and Jerusalem, pursued by his own inner and outer demons.